Every Pulitzer Prize for Fiction Winner of the 21st Century

2017

Colson Whitehead, The Undergound Railroad

“…a potent, almost hallucinatory novel that leaves the reader with a devastating understanding of the terrible human costs of slavery. It possesses the chilling matter-of-fact power of the slave narratives collected by the Federal Writers’ Project in the 1930s, with echoes of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and brush strokes borrowed from Jorge Luis Borges, Franz Kafka and Jonathan Swift … [Whitehead] has told a story essential to our understanding of the American past and the American present.”

–Michiko Kakutani (The New York Times)

2016

Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer

“…surely a new classic of war fiction. ­Nguyen has wrapped a cerebral thriller around a desperate expat story that confronts the existential dilemmas of our age. Startlingly insightful and perilously candid … The contemporary relevance of [the] devastating final section can’t be ignored, but The Sympathizer is too great a novel to feel bound to our current soul-searching about the morality of torture. And it’s even more than a thoughtful reflection about our misguided errand in Southeast Asia. Transcending these historical moments, Nguyen plumbs the loneliness of human life, the costs of fraternity and the tragic limits of our sympathy.”

–Ron Charles, (The Washington Post)

2015

Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“For such a disciplined, measured writer, Doerr’s storytelling mode here is unexpectedly vigorous. Darting back and forth between the two protagonists in the six years leading up to 1944, the book moves with the pace of a thriller. Each two- to four-page chapter offers a sharply etched glimpse into character and circumstance. As a result, the radiant beauty of the prose – and it is gorgeous – never makes us pause too long. The story’s headlong action propels us ever onward … Doerr’s novel spotlights history in vivid primary colors. He makes us not only see but also feel the desolation and barbarism of war … On this stage, at once vast and intimate, Doerr works his magic on the great themes of destiny versus choice, entrapment versus liberation, atrocity versus honor.”

–Dan Cryer (The San Francisco Chronicle)

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